Software costs around the world

Software costs around the world

Posted Jan 9, 2004 8:12 UTC (Fri) by kevinbsmith (subscriber, #4778)
In reply to: LWN's Obviously Incorrect 2004 Predictions by forthy
Parent article: LWN's Obviously Incorrect 2004 Predictions

Even if your $40k number is correct (and it seems to be off by an order of magnitude), Qt still presents problems for lots of folks. I recall seeing that the license is something like $1500 US per year. In less-developed countries, that is a *huge* amount of money. Consider this:

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/

The chart shows how much a copy of WinXP with Office costs in other countries, using GDP as a measure of relative "costs". I don't know how valid that measure is, but at least it's a starting point for the discussion. In the US, WinXP/Office is listed in the chart as costing $560, which is about one third as much as a Qt license.

So we can see that a one-year, one-developer Qt license has a relative cost in Costa Rica and Croatia of over $10k. In Indonesia and Cameroon it costs the equivalent of nearly $100k. In several countries it's over $300k, and in Ethiopia its about $600k. That is for a *single seat* license for *one year*. No big deal, you said?

Even in the US, $1500 per year is a lot of money for a part-time, independent software consultant.

The Qt proprietary license model works great for high-end software development organizations, and for people willing to release their code under the GPL. It fails completely for individual entrepreneurs in wealthy countries, anyone writing non-GPL code in less-developed countries, and any volunteer programmers anywhere who want to create non-GPL code.

TrollTech is not evil. Qt is a nice toolkit. It just isn't economically viable as "the standard" toolkit for all people in all places. Therefore, I personally would rather see GTK+ become "the standard" instead of Qt.

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